interactive design & code exploration

Custom Taxonomy Default Term(s) for when it’s left blank

After looking through the WP codex and various plugins, I couldn’t find anywhere to set a custom taxonomy default term. WordPress has allowed us to create custom taxonomies for a while. Before we only had categories and tags hard coded in core. One feature from those days that didn’t seem to make it to the custom taxonomies of today is the possibility to select a default taxonomy term if none are selected. Did you know about this feature? Odds are you did, even if you didn’t realize it. Have you ever seen that ‘uncategorized’ category? That was the default category added for any content that didn’t have a specific category and was left, well, uncategorized.
An annoying feature if you weren’t expecting it, but nice to have if you took the moment to actually set up your default properly. I was working on a project recently with custom post types and custom taxonomies and suddenly needed this feature, but it didn’t seem to exist, so a few google’s later I found this nice snippet from Micheal Fields. Adopting the hook and adding some to allow for custom post types I wanted to share it here for my own safe keeping as well as the benefit of the community.

This code hooks to ‘save_post’ and fires when the post is saved. It will check the post status and only execute if the post status is set to publish. My addition will also check the post type against your custom post type. Then it sets the default for any taxonomy that you want to set a default for. Either a single term or multiple terms can be set as the default taxonomy term. If you want multiple default terms then you just use a comma separated list. This hook will then load the existing taxonomies and if they are not yet set on the post it will set them to your designated default(s). It’s nice and flexible as you can have multiple taxonomy defaults set quickly in the defaults array. Thanks Michael!

Style Tiles are about designing a system or guide to style a website rather than full comps and mockups. They really come in handy when talking about Responsive Web Design since it frees the designer from having to think about different layouts (as much, it should already be addressed in the wireframe stage). The designer can then focus on thinking about styling the elements and setting rules for a system that will be followed throughout the rest of the site. I really like the thought that style tiles are for when mood boards are too vague and design comps are too precise. Though, It really makes me think about designing a style guide rather than designing a webpage. Then the developers building the website can follow the guide dictated by these style tiles and make simple future-friendly/object oriented/SMACSS/modular css (or sass/less if you prefer). This also leans towards the late trend of moving more of the web design process into the browser.

Ethan Marcotte refers to static comps during the responsive design process as a “catalog of assumptions” Style Tiles are the perfect complement to that catalog, whether it be in place of comps or to reinforce visual themes. Style Tiles don’t imply dimensions nor device; only that the design will be digital.

In addition to Style Tiles, “Component Style Guides” can help with carrying a particular style through specific functionality without designing full web “pages.” These guides are very helpful for responsive designs across a wide number of devices and for implementing design systems for a CMS platform.

I’m constantly excited by the web design industry because as it is such a young field, we are still making up the rules and discovering as a community what process are best. At the same time, the technology driving the field is changing so fast that just when we start to settle into a routine it all gets shook up and flipped on it’s head.

How do you see style tiles benefiting your process? Have you used style tiles in a project?

I love how math creeps into design, programming and other problem solving.

I had some fun playing with Keith’s code (as usual). I’m always impressed with how he’ll see a problem and eventually at least figure out how to solve it using math/trig/physics. It’s a breath of fresh air and it almost makes me wish I was a math teacher and I could whip the example out whenever a student says ‘how is math useful’. I use it and even enjoy using math in my work to solve problems and it what bits I paid attention to in school still really help me.

Anyways, Keith was trying to figure out how to have a ring of a certain number of exactly touching circles around one central circle of a predetermined size. Sounds like a perfect bonus question from trig, right?
Here’s his post: Working out a Math Problem | BIT-101. And then his follow-up post where he gets to what I was expecting in some nice renderings showing how he’s using this simple pattern to make some really interesting designs.

I commented that I liked his problem solving procedure and was interested to see it animated! I love how math creeps into design like this. So I toyed a bit with animating the form. Check out my jsbin at http://jsbin.com/icahul/132/edit.

With all the responsive web design activity over the past few years, I hope that any theme or site we work on we’re able to make responsive to some extent. An important part of making a web site responsive is adding a viewport meta tag to your html. Without explicitly stating our viewport, the mobile browsers will scale down the website to fit into their ‘viewport’. This is a good thing, since if it was a full website and the browser didn’t scale it down, you’d only see the top left corner, or some small section of the site. This viewport was introduced by apple for iOS and has spread to most mobile devices since. There are viewport properties or parameters we can set with this meta tag such as width and scale and can even use some device aware variables (like ‘device-width’) to set these values.

A WordPress Meta Viewport Hook

I usually end up using the following hook to add a viewport meta tag to my head in wordpress. I set the viewport width to match the width of the device. Then I set the initial scale to 1. Some go and set the maximum-scale to 1 as well. This would prevent users from zooming in on your site. I advocate that we should allow users to zoom if they wish since it is a gesture they may be used to and may still need (no matter how nice your RWD is, they may need/want to see it bigger). RWD is about giving the user a better layout for whatever device they are on, not restricting how they view it.

True developers strive to be DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in code as well as workflow and process. Previously, I somehow ended up doing in many of my projects things that plugins could also do.

It’s great to code your own sometimes and if you have specific needs that aren’t addressed by something out there already then sometimes it’s required. I think there is a lot to be said for the state of the plugin community lately. There are plugins to offer solutions many needs beyond what WP core was built to handle.

I’ve found that many times plugins are better then rolling my own solution. Not because I’m a horrible developer (I hope not at least), but because there is real power in numbers.

First off, plugins benefit form the community or users and developers involved in making them work and making them popular. Choose plugins that have a good base of users so when the author or WordPress ships updates, there are many people reporting/testing compatibility issues.

There is a community of people thinking about how to solve recurring needs and many minds working together on something are smarter than one. This is how I’ve come to terms with paying for plugins for an open source and free platform.

It’s worth the expense in the time I save on projects. (Disclaimer: However, I don’t think we should be using a screwdriver as a hammer simply because we can make it work. If you end up hacking plugins to get what you need out of it, then you may be better off building your own.)

This past year, I resorted to using plugins for a lot of the basic functionality I found myself using over and over again on many sites. I’ve been pleasantly impressed. Here are my top 3 plugins of the year:

1. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy by iThemes. Backuping up a site is pretty much essential for anyone who does web work professionally. Not only for security but also for moving sites.

As a developer I’m constantly moving a site from a dev environment to a production environment and vice versa. It was the bain of existence at times, because with WP, moving the site is more than just copying files via ftp. It includes the database and config files and settings in the database too.

BackupBuddy, has helped this become a fairly simple process that lets me export the whole site (database and all) into a zip file and then I can easily place the site on a new domain or environment.

Screenshot of starting the migration/import process with backupbuddy. You do a complete backup, load this php file onto your new site and follow the prompts. They’ve made it surprisingly painless.

The huge win for me is that I’m spending less time managing databases and more time building websites. Although I generally tend towards open solutions, this one has been worth the money spent many times over. (Even when they had an update that broke my database, it still saved me time in the end).

I mainly use this tool to schedule and automate my backups and save them remote locations either weekly or daily and to move my site between dev and production environments for testing and deploying.

2. GravityForms

Gravity Forms by RocketGenius. Forms are a part of every website I’ve built lately. I used to use CF7 and still am a big fan, but I ended up trying this form plugin out once and have been very impressed with the UX and UI. It has many features and is tastefully integrated into WordPress.

Some of my favorite features are that it saves the form submissions into my database and I can send complex notifications about the submission. It also has many field types built in. so if I need to capture someones email and shipping address, there are fields that will validate as such automatically!

True, I could write my own script to do this, but why spend unneeded hours to reinvent the wheel, and test the wheel and maintain the wheel.

Here is the back end of gravity forms. This is where you set up or edit your form. Notice the fields you can select from the right to add to any form as fast as you can drag and drop.

There are many many plugins offered to enhance the gravity form as well, you can integrate easily with MailChimp, Paypal and WordPress itself (for creating user accounts or even content).

I’ve used gravity forms as a simple contact form, as a job application form, as a donate form, newsletter signup form and more. It’s nice to be able to rely on one plugin for all this. The support forum has always been helpful as well.

3. Advanced Custom Fields

Best for last in my list is Advanced Custom Fields by Australian, Elliot Codon. The plugin site lists many add-on plugins that extend the functionality. Hopefully you’ve heard of custom fields in WordPress already, and if not, they are extra data about the post (or whatever type of content you create with custom post types).

You can add an external link, a price, an address or anything you can think of. This isn’t too hard to do in a theme or plugin on your own and has been documented and tutorial-ized many times explaining how to create fields and saving them to the database and grabbing them from the databse… but it does get tedious.

And then there are all the different types of data you may want to store that you end up having to reprogram every time. Text and numeric values are simple enough, but what about a date, an address, an image or a relationship.

Here’s the interface when adding custom fields. You can easily choose the type of data you need and there are multiple options to configure to your situation.

This plugin makes it not only easy, but fun to create custom fields. It adds easy functions for php to grab the data you need at the template level and the UI is entirely seamless with WP. There are many options for conditionally including or requiring the custom fields in the post edit screen etc.

I think this plugin truly transforms WordPress into an open minded CMS with style. Mad props for it not being added to the list of premium plugins (although some add-ons are for sale). I’d vote for this being added to WP Core and won’t likely work on another custom field project without it.

Progress

In all, it’s been a great year to be working with WordPress and it’s only getting better! I’m excited for the number of plugins that are getting better all the time geared towards easing the process of building sites. Equally exciting is the plugin repository at wordpress.org and the recent updates of being able to write reviews for plugins, I think this is a huge step towards letting the cream of the crop rise to the top allowing users and developers alike to find (and support) the best plugins out there.

What plugins have you found that don’t just save you an hour or add a bit of functionality, but that transform your workflow and help you live the DRY mantra?

I came across Shay Howe’s website today for the first time and am very impressed with his learn section. He’s created the content for a course (or 2) to learn HTML and CSS. There is a beginner’s guide and then an advanced one is scheduled too. This is great content or curriculum and would be a great boost to anyone interested on the subject. It is very thorough and teaches good practice with bad vs good examples throughout.

Apps compete with the web for dominance over where people get their content. Apps as games and tools are perfect, but apps for content are not. Content is best on the web, because the web is built for sharing content. The web is open! The web is consolidated and instant and accessible (meaning that any device/browser/screen size/location/etc can already access the web and you can update it anytime and all users see the update instantaneously). The web is also accessible via the defining url. Meaning that it’s a required standard that all assets and bits of content have an address. You can take this address and share it and return to it easily, apps – not so much. You want to share an experience or idea from an app with a friend (sure, some have a process built in), you first check to see if their device has this app available, they want to go through the steps of finding the app and then installing it (likely having to pay money) and then you send them a link have to explain how to get to where the magic happened.

Newfangled, a web agency I respect for being very smart has a great article about this. It was then moved into the basis for a chapter in their ‘The Strategic Web Designer’ Book. I highly recommend them both!

Recently, I stumbled on this tool that has really helped my development process. It keeps my css file(s) current in the browser as I edit and save them. Before this I’d make an edit, save/upload (which I’ve combined into one step with SublimeText) then switch to the browser and refresh the page and/or clear cache to make sure the latest edits are loaded. Then rinse and repeat. But now with this tool I’m able to save my edit and glance at my browser as it auto refreshes the stylesheet once it notices the new file (usually about 1 second) and I see my edit, and continue with my edits. It may seem small but after doing this dozens and perhaps hundreds of times each day you can understand the simplicity of this!

[Before I used a javascript based tool called CSSRefresh which would just automatically reload the css file every second. Which had the same effect, but was a heavy consuming load on the browser as well as on the server. It ended up making the browser go much slower (especially when scrolling) and it crashed it often. Sadly, I was forced to accept the tool as a flop for my workflow.]

SoFresh is a bookmarklet based tool though. It allows you to specify a css file or more to ‘watch’ and then when the file changes on the server it smartly reloads it, saving me the trouble to switch apps reload page and wait and potentially reload while clearing my cache. My refresh and cache shortcut keys are much happier now and I take a breath every time I save an edit.

Here’s a great “HTML5 Love Story” about the team at Sencha, who is passionate about using proper technologies for the one open web, who knew better than to trust that the failure of Facebook to create a reliable HTML5 app for users was because HTML5 wasn’t ready (as Facebook claimed). They built this demo to prove that HTML5 can do all that the now gone native FB app does and faster. The trick is you have to know what you are doing. Something it seems, FB doesn’t. Ready the full story and watch the comparison video: The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story | Blog | Sencha. Or go try it yourself. Visit http://fb.html5isready.com on your favorite mobile browser.

When we started what became Sencha, we made a bet on the web: a bet that modern application development didn’t need anything except the browser, a great set of frameworks and a great set of tools. With those three weapons in hand, we knew developers could build applications that would delight users. The advent of HTML5 upped the game and it gave developers even more tools to let them treat the browser as an application development platform and not a page rendering engine. Developers sprang at the opportunity and unleashed a torrent of apps — on both desktop and mobile — that leveraged the new HTML5 capabilities to build amazing applications using web standards.

So, when Mark Zuckerberg said HTML5 wasn’t ready, we took a little offense to the comment.

We thought to ourselves: HTML5 can’t really be the reason that Facebook’s mobile application was slow. We knew what the browser on modern smart phones was capable of and what kind of rich capabilities HTML5 offered. We saw the latest generation of mobile devices — running at least iOS 5 or Android 4.1 — push ever increasing performance and HTML5 implementation scores. But perhaps most importantly, we’d seen what our customers were building and the amazing things they were creating using HTML5.

I totally agree with this sentiment and believe that native apps are the new flash to the web. They are fun and seem to be the way, but give it a few years and these native apps will quickly give way to web based apps that are browser based and offer speed and flexibility and consistence to the web experience. Sure, flash can do things that html still can’t. But I’m pretty sure no one would want to build their whole site in flash today. They would put the parts that need to be or the parts that belong in flash in flash and let the rest be standards compliant open web. Facebook has essentially built a flash based website for phones to access their website content. They will have to maintain and update this separate from their “real” version.

Our smart phones are helping us converge our devices, as in we no longer need a phone a camera a gps a notepad a … But it is not helping us converge our internet or content. We currently need to use a website in one way at our desk and another way on the go. Websites and the internet should have the same capabilities and the same uses no matter where we decide to use it. Sencha is showing us that, built correctly, HTML5 truly is ready to handle many things that belong in the browser rather than in a native app. We should never need to download a native app to access website data that we normally would just login at our desk. That’s inefficient, divergent and complicated. It’s against the openness and standards everyone preached and pined for and indeed “won” when flash-haters succeeded in ousting flash from mobile browsers. I actually respect Adobe for finally pulling the plug there because they too, believe in the web (and at the time, I was a full-time flash developer). I believe in the web too and that’s why I call it the one open web.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to present at WordCamp Atlanta 2014. That makes the 3rd year in a row I’ve been able to contribute to WordCamp Atlanta! Here are my slides. I’ll be posting a full blown post of my presentation as soon as I can get it all down. Plus I hear […]

Great read if you haven’t yet read it yet: Frank Chimero : What screens want : http://frankchimero.com/what-screens-want/ web and interaction design are just as much children of filmmaking as they are of graphic design. Maybe even more so. After all, we both work on screens, and manage time, movement, and most importantly, change. So what […]

Wisdom for bug reporting from Newfangled There are a few things a developer usually needs to know in order to diagnose a bug, and these are the things we’re likely to come back and ask you about if you haven’t already provided them. So, to ensure we can help you as quickly as possible, here’s […]

Great summary and call to arms to write our own content in our own ways on our own sites. Call it what you like but ‘blogging’ is somewhat waning, in the social webs. Since as easy it is to create your own site and express your own voice, we’re flocking to the ‘services’ that will […]

I’d heard of the ‘coding maths’ series, but hadn’t watched it yet. I should have, it’s great! Keith Peters (one of the people who first got me into scripting) has a great series about the math behind coding and as always he has a way of making complex things simple to me! Learn all you […]

Who’s behind circlecube?

I'm Evan Mullins. I'm a web designer and am very interested in the intersection of art & technology, user experience, and interactive design. I like contributing to make the web incrementally a better place. I love simultaneously solving problems & making things aesthetically brilliant. circlecube is my interactive design site chock full of tutorials, critiques, techniques, technologies, ramblings and a playground of experiments. Welcome to it!